Prof. Lynn Stephen

The 2015 Michael Kearney Lecture principle speaker is the Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences, Prof. Lynn Stephen. She is a professor and Director, Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies (CLLAS) at the University of Oregon.

Lynn Stephen is a cultural anthropologist whose interdisciplinary research has been at the forefront of illuminating major challenges facing Mesoamerican indigenous peoples–out-migration, tourism, state assimilation programs and nationalism, economic development, and low-intensity war—and of analyzing the spectrum of local and global responses they have developed to these issues, including social movements, unique educational and knowledge systems, innovative forms of media and governance and rights claiming. Gender and its intersection with race, class, ethnicity, and nationalism has been the primary lens for much of this work. Her research over three decades has anticipated the ways that globalization is creating new forms of transborder social and political organization. Her theoretical concept of transborder communities has been widely adopted by scholars of migration in many fields, as has her research on gender in indigenous populations.